D-Wave Systems is based in Burnaby, British Columbia, and in May
2011 announced its D-Wave One computer, deemed "the world's first
commercially available quantum computer." It had 128 qubits, or
quantum bits, notionally a way of gauging its performance. The
company's most recent efforts have yielded 512-qubit chips for
doing incredibly complex math accurately and speedily.

D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell told us that the company's existing investors "gave [the
company] complete support, going beyond and upping percentage of
ownership. The mix of old and new investors came up with a sum
that will largely go to the software side in order to make this
technology more usable for more people. No PhD. required."

The company will of course continue to grow its processor development and
make investments in the underlying technology that facilitates
its business. Mr. Brownell was kind enough to take some time
for

BUSINESS INSIDER: When
acquaintances ask you what a quantum computer is, what do you
tell them?

VERN BROWNELL: I'm still struggling with coming
up with a good explanation. It's a computer that uses quantum
mechanics to do calculations. Everyone agrees that quantum
mechanics, as discovered in the early 20th century, are the most
fundamental laws of the universe.

In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists conjectured you could build a
computer to tap into quantum mechanical principles. It would have
unprecedented speed over classical computing and could solve
problems that classical computers can not.
We're happy to be the
first to do it.

BI: How will quantum computing matter to the everyday
consumer?

VB: All computing is migrating to cloud access.
We'll be accessing quantum resources remotely though ubiquitous
cloud-type services the same way that one might access classical
resources through Amazon Web Services. Game developers might
develop certain aspects of a game using it. It will give you the
opportunity to use what's right for the task you're trying to
accomplish.

The nice thing about this approach is that not everyone needs to
buy a system to have access.

BI: Why does quantum computing and other quantum
technology sound like magic to us?

VB: Even the greatest minds have said that
quantum mechanics is not something that's easily understood, or
even understandable at all. Richard Feynman famously said,
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't
understand quantum mechanics."

If you think about the quantum mechanical properties inside the
computer, you have the concept of superposition, in which quantum
bits can be zeroes, ones, or both at once. This is not to say
that half the time it's a zero and the other half the time it's a
one. They are really in two states at the same time.
What does that mean? We don't have the language for it, but these
bits are in two states at the same time. It's not well
understood, but there are
lots of things we don't understand yet and still use. This is
just the latest example.

BI: What are the potential implications of quantum
computing with respect artificial intelligence?

VB: One of our largest areas of exploration is
in machine learning. You might think of it as AI 2.0. Many
machine learning techniques involve training algorithms to do a
particular task. Google tried to detect a car in an image. If you
sit down as a programmer to try to do that, it's quite difficult.
You know a car has four wheels and so on, but how do you program
that? You can show the computer a million pictures with cars in
it, a million without, and then have it figure out its own notion
of a car. It can be as — or more — effective than our own notion.

BI: Is it fair to say that quantum computing could change
the tech landscape as severely as personal computing did in the
late 1970s?

VB: Computers used to be programmed in
complex assembly language. Then Bill Gates and Paul Allen
introduced the first Basic interpreter, and that was it.
Right now I think we're at the
dawn of the quantum computing age, to extent that we're at that
early stage where things start taking shape.

Every 2 years we're quadrupling the number of qubits (quantum
bits inside a processor). We
made the decision that we would only attempt this if we could
build it with semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
All other quantum
computing efforts around the world are — no disrespect — lab
experiments. They're not built with manufacturing in mind. This
is what's allowed us to scale to the semiconductor environment
today.

If you plot our progress since 2004 — we started in 1999, but the
first 5 years were exploratory — iteratively we've been building
larger and larger processors, doubling the number qubits in our
processors every year. We've been able to do this because we use
semiconductor manufacturing technology. It sounds obvious in
retrospect, but no one else is doing it.